The cold blue, salmon-rich water and vast green terrain of Alaska's McNeil River Sanctuary make it perfect bear country. Lauren Maxwell, Anchorage-based investigator for the Wild America Society, has flown there after getting an urgent message from her friend Roland Taft, an eccentric biologist and staunch defender of Ursa arctos, horribilis, the savage grizzly.What she finds is the bloodstained ground of a fresh kill --and enough of a body to know Roland won't be meeting her then, or ever.

The evidence clearly shows that a grizzly killed him, but too many unanswered questions convince Lauren that this was no random bear attack. She suspects that Roland made a deadly enemy of Kirby Rogers, the sanctuary's macho, pro-hunting administrator, and may have run afoul of powerful business and oil interests. But proving that Roland's death is murder means going deep into the wild to search for clues. And a woman naturalist--even one who carries a.45-caliber Colt automatic in her backpack-- may become Alaska's next endangered species as she pushes her intelligence and strength to the limits on the trail of a killer...the two-legged kind.

Genre: Mystery